Motivation

What’s your motivation to get up and do things?  What drives you to try or excel?  Where do you find your fuel to get you through the day?

I’m looking for my motivation.  It’s missing.  As is my sleep.  I wonder how much they are connected.  Sleep and health and good nutrition probably all play a part in fueling your day, but when you are lacking, how do you find the motivation needed?

I have so much I need and want to do each day, and I am dragging.  Just wanting to get something done only gets you so far.  You need a body healthy enough to carry out your plans.  So maybe that’s where I should begin.  I am dreading my upcoming visit with my Doc, and have put off scheduling it.  Until then, I should work on what I can, like decent nutrition and making a better evening routine and schedule for sleep.  Wish me luck.

New Year and New Routines

I’m finally getting settled into the new routines brought on by the calendar change.  Did you know how easy it is to slip a “1″ in front of the “0″ if you catch yourself writing ’09 in time?  That’s way down in the weeds compared to some changes this year, but we are managing and rolling with them all.

Having two children in kindergarten has been surprisingly complex from a scheduling aspect.  They are each on a schedule to best meet their educational needs which in layman terms means I get to run around a lot and each day is broken up into pieces too small to get anything substantial done.  Mondays are the real fun though because I am supposed to be at two places at once.  Don’t try this at home.  I am an untrained non-professional.

I think I should get an honorary doctorate in scheduling considering all the ex’s and parenting schedules and activities I manage to work around.  I had so many lovely little thoughts about what things I would accomplish while the kids were in school. Ah well… change is inevitable and we keep rolling with it.

End of the Year Ramblings

So many things I look back on in 2009, some in awe, regret, gratitude, loss, humility, and the list goes on.  How do I avoid the mistakes of last year and improve upon the  things I want to embrace in the coming year?  I have so many thoughts swirling and branching and trailing off into places I cannot yet see.

I once had a young man break up with me when I didn’t know we were dating, but he taught me something: his dad taught him to review each day before he went to sleep and think of what worked, what didn’t, what he would do better, etc.  I liked that idea:  Evaluate the actions of each day and make daily resolutions.  I think about it now as I ponder the yearly resolutions many of us talk about and make as a custom.  How many items wouldn’t even be on our lists if we evaluated our lives daily instead of just at the end of the year?

The more I think of it, the more I see the perfect wisdom in the admonitions to pray morning and night, as well as at other times.  You have to review your day in order to thank Him for it, review your actions if you need to ask forgiveness, and you ask for His help in doing better and reaching your goals.  Likewise, the next morning as you kneel you again focus on what you want the day to be like, how you want to be, and ask His help in moving you through it all.

As I continue in my own thoughts, and hope I have written them clearly enough for readers to follow, the simplest, standard answers to questions on how to live resonate from Sunday School classes as a small child: Pray and Read the Scriptures.  I don’t need to make pages of lists of things I want to do in the coming year because if I keep it simple, pray and read the scriptures, the rest will come in due time.

To Change

Routines are a way of life when you have a child on the autistic spectrum.  My second oldest has struggled with the differences in how he perceives the world and how he expects it to be since infancy.  I have been there trying to help understand his world and help him to understand how to adapt or find work-arounds.  We usually find the most peace when the world is ordered and happens as he expects it to happen, though sometimes that means a lot of hard work in adapting his expectations.

Soon we begin another school year which brings a new locker, new schedule, new people in his classes, new teachers, and so many new routines.  Will he have time to make it to his locker between each of his classes or will some be so far apart that we might need a secondary locker?  Will the flow of the day “work” for him?  He can get very anxious about time and being late so if the crowd of students cause a jam in a hall he needs to travel we can have issues.

He has been with his dad for several weeks and returns today.  There is one change.  We need to work toward getting back to a school year sleep schedule.  There is another change.  His younger brother is going to start sleeping on the bottom bunk in his room (if all goes well).  Big change.  Tomorrow we pay his fees for school, get his locker, and will take a couple dry-runs walking through his scheduled classes so he can feel more comfortable with the time to walk to each and we can maybe find any issues that need tweaking.  Multiple changes there.

In the coming weeks as we transition to school for all of the children, not just him, we face a lot of change.  Having a child who has special needs seems to increase and amplify changes.  My goal is to increase and amplify my abilities to help all the children, and me, adjust to the change and find peace.